Friday, May 13, 2016

Bernie Sanders supporters prepare for post primary campaign against Donald Trump once their "zombie candidate" is eliminated after California.

A group of Bernie Sanders staffers and volunteers is circulating a draft proposal calling on the senator to get out of the presidential race after the final burst of Democratic primaries on June 7, and concentrate on building a national progressive organization to stop Donald Trump.

Operating under the assumption that Sanders will win the California primary but still fall far short of amassing enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination, the document calls for the Vermont senator to exit the race and launch an independent political group far larger than any other recent post-campaign political operations, such as those started by Howard Dean or Barack Obama.

The working title for the roughly 1,600-word document: “After Winning on June 7th Bernie Sanders Should Suspend his Campaign and Launch an Independent Organization to Defeat Donald Trump."

Nice to see some of Sanders' supporters recognizing the obvious.

This information coincides with Sanders admission that Hillary Clinton can beat Donald Trump in the general.

If he wants to do it—if Sanders wants to build a lasting movement to fight money’s outsize influence—he has to close one door to open another. The transition from contender to gracious supporter of the nominee isn’t easy for any presidential candidate, but he needs to make it, and soon.

We already know Sanders isn’t going to win the Democratic Party’s nomination; Hillary Clinton has amassed more than 92 percent of the delegates needed to secure the nomination, and she’ll easily pick up the rest. So right now, Sanders’ campaign is the walking dead: a zombie. And having worked for John Kerry during the slugfest of the 2004 primaries, I’ve seen up close how much damage this sort of prolonged "zombie" candidacy can inflict on the eventual nominee—and what’s ultimately at stake for the country.

In fact there is evidence that Sanders has already had a negative effect on Hillary's chances moving forward.

In this week’s Economist/YouGov Poll, one in three Democratic primary voters have an unfavorable opinion of Clinton, and that figure has been rising all year. But it only jumped above 30% a few weeks ago. As Clinton pivots to a general election campaign, and frequently ignores Sanders, he continues to win primaries – with his political television advertising unanswered by Clinton ads in some states.

The growth in negative views about Clinton comes from Sanders supporters. In this week’s poll, 61% of Democratic primary voters who support Sanders have an unfavorable view of Clinton. Clinton’s voters are more positive about the Vermont Senator: 58% of them have a favorable view of Sanders, and just 39% are unfavorable. But that lower negative assessment of Sanders by Clinton supporters has also grown. It has jumped 20 points since early March, and 12 points since early April.

So if Sanders stubbornly continues the campaign that many of his own staffers and supporters recognize is doomed to fail, and it continues to damage the eventual nominee's approval ratings (Which plays right into the hands of the Republican nominee in the general), then just what is the point again?

73 comments:

Jane Sanders won't let Senator Bernie Sanders I-Vermont come to his senses and stop Bernie from destroying the Democratic Party

Bernie and Jane have been loyal Independent Party members for quite some time now and just now switched to the Democratic Party in hopes of becoming the President of the United States of America and the First Lady of the Newly Formed Socialist Democratic Party of America.

It's going to take both Sanders and Clinton to heal the wounds if the Donald is to be beaten in November. If Hillary would acknowledge Bernie and his supporter's "campaign against big money corruption" I think we have a good chance.

@ anon 9:17 amObama's campaign did not pay off Hillary's debt, Hillary and Bill went on a speaking tour to do so.And yet Bernie has spent millions more than Hillary so far in this campaign, so apparently Bernie loves big money.

The Sanders campaign isn't so organized when it comes to following FEC rules on donation limits and foreign nationals. The FEC has already made him answer to a bunch of questionable donations. He might find in the end he needs a bail out.

12:23 - it's not the responsibility of the campaign to keep track of whether a donor has reached his limit or have a mechanism for determining a donor is not a US citizen. When you make a donation, you attest that you're a US citizen. If the FEC finds out you are not, you are in trouble, not the campaign you donated to. The campaign just returns the money.

It's the responsibility of each donor to keep track of whether they've reached their limit. When the FEC tells a campaign a donor is over their limit, the campaign simply returns the excess and the FEC warns the donor to keep better track of their donations or goes after them for fraud if they think it wasn't a mistake.

The Sanders campaign could fix this by having their system keep track of how much a person donates and letting them know if they are past the limit. Sanders continues to have problems with this, yet does nothing to fix it. They should be doing audits to their own donation database to make sure.

You would think that a candidate who is so vocal about campaign finance reform would do a better job at policing his own campaign financing (or getting someone competent to do it for him).

The Hillary Clinton campaign does not suffer from violations because they have systems in place to deal with those issues as they arise. You can be 100% certain that Hillary's campaign frequently receives illegal donations of all sizes and descriptions.

The Sanders campaign is either crooked or inept. The FEC's biggest issue is that the Sanders campaign is not returning donations it knows are illegal. The FEC have been after them for months about this. Why are they hanging on to the money? Is it because they're so honest?

I think they are running out the clock on the tax returns. Pretty soon it won't matter that they didn't produce them and whatever they are trying to hide won't be an issue. They say they use Turbo Tax. It shouldn't take months to come up with past year's filings. It should take minutes.

I bet this "draft paper" is the reason Michael Ceraso, Sanders' CA campaign manager was fired. He either wrote it or leaked it to Politico. Sanders has no incentive to drop out after the primaries but before the convention. He's got no campaign debt to buy. They're not going to offer him VP or a cabinet position. They can't tell him it's his turn next time like they did with Clinton. He can't be bought.

Based on the re-emergence of the calls from elites like Feinstein, Steve Israel and Brown for Sanders to drop out, I think Clinton's internal polling is showing she's losing California.

1:32 - You are too suggestible. Here are the 25 top smears that Clinton has experienced in the past 30 years. If any ONE of them were true, she would have been off the political scene years ago; she never would have passed vetting for Secretary of State. If she is so "corrupt," why did Sanders vote her in for Sec. of State? Why did they vote the same way 93% of the time in the Senate when they served together? http://www.marketwatch.com/story/all-the-terrible-things-hillary-clinton-has-done-in-one-big-list-2016-02-04

Trump on ‘smart’ women: They’re manipulative ‘killers’ who use their bodies to get ahead

...On Friday, CNN pointed out that the description comes from Trump’s chapter on women from his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback.

“The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers,” wrote the erstwhile reality TV star. “The person who came up with the expression ‘the weaker sex’ was either very naïve or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye — or perhaps another body part.”

Fox & Friends has a full-blown freakout over Bernie Sanders ‘enslaving’ children with socialism

“But here we have a system that is indoctrinating our children into slavery and the proof of that is Bernie Sanders,” Sorbo asserted. “Because you have a whole group of students now who believe in socialism. And they weren’t taught that socialism is the greatest form of slavery known to mankind. It has murdered in the hundreds of millions of people. And yet, we have young people who believe in socialism and they’re voting for Bernie Sanders.”

Scientists confirm what conservatives always deny: Tea Party driven by fear of a black president

Researchers at Stanford University found that when they showed white subjects photos of President Barack Obama with darkened skin, those people became more likely to support right-wing political organizations like the Tea Party.

According to the Washington Post, sociologist Robb Willer and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments from 2011 to 2015 in which they demonstrated that some white voters may be driven by unconscious racial biases against people with darker skin.

The study came about when Willard found himself pondering why racist hysteria has ratcheted up in this country since the election of President Obama in 2008. The ranks of white supremacist groups swelled after Obama entered the White House and watchdog groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center report that hate groups have become more active in recent years.

In Republican politics, right-wing extremist Tea Party candidates ran longstanding GOP officials out of office as conservatives in this country doubled down in opposing the president and his policies.

“That left a lot of analysts slack-jawed, wondering: What was this latent force that drove the emergence of this movement?” Willer told the Post.

The research team interviewed volunteers who they separated into two groups. One group was shown photos of celebrities which included a photo of Obama with digitally lightened skin. The other group saw the same photos, but with an image of Obama with darker skin.

Among 255 white subjects, people shown the darkened picture of Obama were almost twice as likely to say that they support the Tea Party when questioned by researchers.

America’s ‘exceptional’ lack of a female President in global perspective

...Americans have been leading the cause of gender equality in the 21st century. Can they match global rhetoric of women’s empowerment and their domestic politics? Will the daughters of liberty finally have their day in the sun? In Hillary Rodham Clinton, they seem to have a viable candidate, and as good a chance as they’ve had in the past 240 years.

Cult of Personality: How Trump Uses the Playbook of Europe's Far Right

Almost a year into his surreal campaign for president, the American political class still doesn’t know what to make of Donald Trump. The billionaire mogul’s defiance of all the standard rules of American politics, not to mention the orthodoxy of his own party, has left pundits scrambling to explain his takeover of the Republican Party. They should look abroad. Ironically, a campaign built on “making America great again” bears a strong resemblance to right-wing movements overseas, past and present. Maybe the question, then, is not how Trump did it but why the United States hasn’t seen this kind of movement take off until now. Instead of underlining American exceptionalism, Trump is unleashing a political force that’s already prominent in other parts of the world.

...Trump believes that when Hillary Clinton secures the Democratic nomination, he can convince millions of Sanders supporters to defect and support him.

Is he right? A McClatchy/Marist poll last month found that “One out of four Sanders supporters—25 percent—say they would not back Clinton in a general election if she became the Democratic nominee for president, while just 69 percent say they would support her.” So clearly there is a significant number of gettable Sanders voters.

But can Trump get them? His positions and strident rhetoric on immigration, Muslims, and women are an anathema to the far left, and they throw into doubt whether many of those voters would cross over and support Trump.

WATCH: Trump Lashes Out After Being Grilled To His Breaking Point By ABC Host

George Stephanopoulos allowed presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to phone into Good Morning America on Friday morning only to be grilled for not releasing his tax returns.

“Do you believe voters have a right to see your tax returns before they make a final decision?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“I don’t think they do,” Trump replied before claiming that he will “gladly” release his returns once the IRS completes an audit against him. Of course, the audit may not be over until after the election, a fact that even Trump conceded despite feigning hope that it will end before November.

Stephanopoulos didn’t buy that argument, however, pointing out that an audit didn’t prevent former President Richard Nixon from releasing his tax returns.

“The IRS has made it very clear that an audit is not a bar to public release,” Stephanopoulos said. “It’s entirely your choice. President Nixon released his tax returns even though he was under audit and when you were seeking a casino license in Pennsylvania and New Jersey you released your returns to state officials even though you were under audit.”

Trump repeated that he will not release his returns until after the audit is complete, which may or may not be completed until after the election, so the audit is a rather convenient excuse for Trump.

Trump then erroneously claimed that many presidents have not released their tax returns, and Stephanopoulos didn’t let him get away it. “Every single nominee since 1976 has released his tax returns,” the ABC host informed Trump.

Trump went on to claim that his release of his “financials” should be enough, but Stephanopoulos noted that such documents fail to show what his tax rate is and how much in taxes he pays.

That really set Trump off as he began to complain about having to pay taxes and he admitted that he “tries very hard” to pay as little in taxes as possible. As we all know, the reason why Bernie Sanders has been so popular this election season is because one of his goals is to force the wealthy 1 percent to pay their fair share of taxes.

Testiness on Trump’s part dominated the remaining part of the interview as Trump repeated that he would not release his returns until the audit is complete and claimed that he shouldn’t have to release his returns until Hillary Clinton releases nonexistent missing emails. When pressed further on his returns, Trump said curtly that it’s “none of your business.”

Based on the predictions from FiveThirtyEight, I don't see enough pledged delegates for Hillary to reach 2,383 before Philadelphia. Of course she would want the competition to drop out because it seems that might be the only way she would make that threshold.

There are also provisional ballots to be counted in Brooklyn and Maryland that may change the numbers slightly.

Here is the table by state:http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/delegate-targets/democrats/

A slight change in numbers wouldn't make any difference. And she will come close enough that the Superdelegates will support her as the candidate with the most support.

Maybe she would like Sanders to drop out because she wants to focus on Trump and the general election, but there's no way she's going to lose this nomination. She is far ahead of Sanders by any measure.

Sanders speaks for a significant subset of Democratic voters. He won’t win, but his presence in the race is its own justification: to force Clinton to engage with the issues progressives and young voters care about. And thereby force her to take positions that those voters can hold her to in a general election. That’s a good thing for the long-term viability of the party.

Sanders, therefore, can – and should – campaign until the convention, at which point he can – and will – throw his support behind Clinton.

I think he should keep hammering the corruptness of HRC and the DNC, these are exactly the kinds of crony institutions that need to be exposed and torn down. That is exactly what people are wanting to see happen, and he needs to keep going after them.

Sanders was asked multiple times for just a single incidence when a vote of hers was influenced by money she was paid by some special interest group. He couldn't do it.

There's no proof of any corruption. Plus, most of the time, when Sanders or his supporters talk about "corruption" it's nothing more than a known standard operating procedure that they don't like or people favoring the other candidate simply because they prefer her.

The rest of the time, Sanders and his supporters are just making innuendos of corruption.

!2:19, You are right. Sanders is forcing the party consider issues important to most working class Americans, not Wall St. Sanders voters are reacting to the Democratic party’s desertion of the working class in its sellout to Wall St. in the 1990s under the Clintons’ leadership. (See below.)

People voting for Sanders are participating in democracy where voters actually have a choice of candidates with different policies. Hilary is ahead of Sanders now mainly because she has 500+ super delegates who pledged to her BEFORE anyone else had declared to run. The super delegates do not have to vote in accordance with the popular vote. In other words, the voters can be negated by the super delegate system which is obviously undemocratic and beholden to special interests. In essence, the DNC and the Clintons and their New Democrat partisans anointed Hilary as the candidate and are now discounting and trying to discredit the wishes of millions of Democrats and other voters who support the policies represented by Sanders. That they are now trying to discredit Sanders and his voters only shows how far to the right New Democrats are and how little they value democracy, where voters make their wishes known by voting for a candidate representing their interests best.

Sanders voters are a large group of disaffected Democrats, new voters, and independents. If Sanders and the policies he represents are not embraced by the Clinton wing of the party, the party stands to lose millions of potential votes—spin and image won’t do—there has to be substantive change in the party to keep the voters fed up with the status quo.

“Bill Clinton and Al Gore were two of the most powerful leaders of the “New Democrats” – a group of Democrats determined to move the party strongly to the right on economics, budget, national security, regulation, and crime. The New Democrats’ policy apparatus was funded overwhelmingly by Wall Street but its ideological support came from economists who were “liberal” on some social issues. The Clintons and Gore delivered for Wall Street by embracing the three “de’s” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization that encouraged and allowed twin bubble to rapidly expand. The “dot com” bubble was the first bubble to burst. The housing bubble burst in late 2006, leading to the financial crises of 2008 and the Great Recession that began in 2007.” Bill Black: “Liberal” Economists Cheered the New Democrats’ Deregulation of Finance

(Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives)

Hang on to your hats, folks! Bernie Sanders will be our new President.

This campaign season has been long enough that we have seen Hillary waffling on her position on key issues over these months. We don't need Bernie to point it out. We don't need the FBI investigation to end in indictment. We merely have to be paying attention to this election cycle to see for ourselves that this person does not have the moral compass or leadership vision to hold the position of president.

Hillary is doing herself in all on her own. The more she talks, the more she has started to contradict herself. No doubt the reason for the truncated debate schedule.

Pressure is mounting on Bernie Sanders to end his campaign for president, with Democratic Party leaders raising alarms that his continued presence in the race is undermining efforts to beat presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump this fall.The new concerns come after Sanders’ recent wins over front-runner Hillary Clinton in Indiana and West Virginia. While those victories have provided his supporters a fresh sense of momentum heading into next week’s primaries in Kentucky and Oregon, they did almost nothing to help Sanders cut into Clinton’s nearly insurmountable lead in the delegates who will decide their party’s nomination....

Yet there is no question his campaign is on its last legs. His fundraising dropped by about 40 percent last month and he’s laid off hundreds of staffers. Biden said this week he “feels confident” that Clinton will be the nominee. Even Obama is pointing out the realities of the delegate math, which puts Clinton on track to capture the nomination early next month....

How many campaign advisers and staff have Hillary fired as they make it to the hooooooge state of California and beyond? But Bernie's allowed to stay in as long as he wishes, or he can move the revolution up further so everyone who wants to vote for him gets their chance. If that's what Bernie wants, let him.OR he could have been honest from the beginning and explained what a "socialist democrat" is and what makes that different than a Democrat or Independent.

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This blog is dedicated to finding the truth, exposing the lies, and holding our politicians and leaders accountable when they fall far short of the promises that they have made to both my fellow Alaskans and the American people.